Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Explanations of design intent might be the most underrated kind of documentation. There's so little of that nowadays in general, in any technology. Personally, I blame shortened attention spans, the death of programming books, and the rise of Stack Overflow. I'm not familiar with the Apple ecosystem, is it really worse in this regard than others? I also blame dogmatic misunderstandings that have crystalized around…
I completely agree. I never understood the argument of docs getting out of sync. If an organization prioritizes documentation then the comments are just as likely to stay in sync as the variables.
It's the easiest to keep in sync. It lives in the code it documents. It's in the same version control repo and the same version of the source building a binary can build the docs. If it ever does get out of sync with the code it's the most straightforward to fix because it's the same process for fixing an issue in the code itself.